The difficulty with 3d plots is that by definition, you’re looking at a 3d plot on a 2d surface. Wouldn’t you like to be able to rotate that plot around a bit? We’ll use the package rgl. Then type:

library(rgl)
plot3d(x,y,z)

This pulls up an interactive window which you can rotate. Very helpful? Perhaps, but there are too many plots. Perhaps you only want to look at the middle 33% of the plots (i.e. look at a subset of the plot)?

startplot

This looks much better. We’ve said we’d start at 33% of the way through the x,y,z co-ordinates, and end at 66% with the startplot and endplot variables. This is helpful – remember this is one year of data, and we’ve just displayed the middle of the year. The heatmap also helps to distinguish between plots, but in this case it doesn’t add any extra data – more of that in posts to come.